A dark day for blondes

If I were to tell you that Britney Spears has recently embraced the dark side you might well offer a leisurely shrug, because after the hurly-burly of Kevin Federline, Vegas weddings, babies, boozehounding and doughnuts, she's pretty much wrung our shockability dry. Plus you might remember that time a few years ago when she went a little bit raunchy wearing leather and writhing around on a motorcycle for a Joan Jett cover. But the wholly less predictable, and therefore mildly startling news - and I do hope you are sitting down at this moment - is that the princess of pop has dyed her hair black.

Whenever a blondini goes brunette it always ruffles a few feathers, and intentionally so. Spears's dramatic transformation might easily be interpreted as a fevered clutch for publicity - rumour has it that her celebrity currency is down after she allegedly failed to sell photographs of her pregnancy for more than $5,000.

However, for a blonde starlet, just as for a 14-year-old prototype goth, dyeing one's hair dark generally heralds a new-found desire to be taken seriously. Other notable examples have included Renée Zellweger, Gwyneth Paltrow and Scarlett Johansson. It is the tonsorial equivalent of wearing a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and a chignon with a well-thumbed copy of Sartre under one's arm, as if hoping someone might suddenly declare, "Why Miss Spears! You're intellectual!"

For further proof we must turn to the consummate wisdom of Rod Stewart: "Well just awatch them sisters on a Saturday night," he husks in Blondes (Have More Fun) "Peroxide causin' all the fights". Because while the blondes are busy having all the fun and the fights, brunettes are largely assumed to be sitting in arthouse cinemas and perusing their polo-neck collections. Indeed, as Stewart noted in a rare hommage to brunettes, Red Hot In Black: "I met her in a little French cafe/ Legs like a young giraffe/ She was sitting reading Baudelaire/ Not exactly working class."

Rest assured, however, that Britney will soon be back to her trademark blonde - few dabblers in the dark arts of hair dye make a permanent transition, and with Spears in particular, the bleached locks embody her appeal: fun and unapologetically synthetic. Her brief flirtation with brunette is simply a message to the world that she isn't feeling very fun right now. Indeed, let us return to the words of Mr Stewart, in his seminal text, Every Picture Tells a Story: "Spent some time feelin' inferior/ Standing in front of my mirror/ Combed my hair in a thousand ways/ But I came out looking just the same".